The Man With Candy (29 page)

Two weekends before his death, Corll drove Betty Hawkins and her young sons to his family’s retreat near Lake Sam Rayburn. “We rode in the van, and the kids sat in the back on that cushion he’d rigged up,” the woman recounted. “On the way we got to talking, and he said that he’d smoked marijuana once in a while, but I never saw him do it. He said that he knew some kids that sniffed glue and stuff like that, and he said, ‘That stuff’ll kill you. I can’t understand a kid even wanting to do something like that.’”

When they reached the cabin, Corll quickly downed three strong drinks of bourbon. “I’d
never
seen him do that before,” Betty said. “He was acting so different. He wouldn’t stay still. He wouldn’t sit. I was accustomed to seeing him relaxed and talking, playing with the kids, but he didn’t even pay any attention to them. He acted like a man with something on his mind.”

In the afternoon, Corll plopped on the couch and said, “Well, I been thinking about leaving my job.”

“Leaving your job?” the surprised woman said.

“Yeh. I been thinking about going to Colorado. You want to go with me?”

“Yes!” she answered quickly. “But why do you want to leave the light company? You make five dollars an hour. That’s good money.”

“Yeh, I make good money, but I don’t have anything to show for it.”

“Well, what’ll you do in Colorado?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go back in the candy business.”

Later that Sunday, the restive man asked one of the Hawkins’ boys, “How would you like for me and Mama to get married and have y’all a little sister?” The offhand remark gave Betty a warm feeling; perhaps, after the indifferent five-year courtship, they would finally have their happy ending. But nothing more was said on the subject. En route to Houston in the white Ford van, Betty Hawkins watched Dean closely, “and from the expressions on his face I knew something was bothering him, and I wanted to ask him so bad, but with him I’ve always figured if he wanted to tell me something, he’d tell me. He was the secretive kind of person that if he didn’t want to tell you something, he would go all around the question, and by the time he got through you didn’t even know what question you’d asked.” She ran out of cigarets and asked Dean to stop, but he kept passing up gasoline stations and stores and finally seemed to forget her request altogether. “That was so unlike him,” she said. “I knew there was something really wrong.”

On Sunday night, August 5, three days before his death, Corll called to chat. Betty said, “Well, I finally made up my mind to move out to my brother’s trailer.”

“How come are you gonna do that?” Corll asked.

“I don’t know. I just want out of this neighborhood.”

“Or be ready to go with me?” Dean asked suspiciously.

“Yeh,” the woman admitted.

“Well, I talked to Mom. She asked if you were coming, and I told her not right away.”

Betty’s heart sank. “What do you
mean?”
she blurted out.

“Well, it’s kinda scary with one person going up to Colorado, much less taking four,” Dean said. “And I don’t really have a job.”

The disappointed woman said, “If you don’t take me now, you won’t come back and get me!”

“I don’t know,” Corll answered in a noncommittal tone. “Right now I’m pretty lonesome.”

“When are you gonna leave?”

“Well, it isn’t right to do this to the light company, but what I’ll probably do is I get a check the last of the month, and when I get it I’ll probably leave and not go back to work the next morning. I don’t really like doing that. I should give them notice, but I can’t. Whenever I do leave, don’t tell David Brooks where I went.”

Betty wanted to ask for a fuller explanation, but she held her tongue. It was her last chance.

In Manitou Springs, Colorado, Mary West was becoming concerned about her son’s erratic behavior. He had called her on July 25, the day Charles Cobble and Marty Ray Jones disappeared, and when she asked how he was, he answered, “I’m in trouble. I’m leaving here. I’m just gonna drop out of the picture.” While his mother gasped, he said, “I might even take an overdose.”

“Dean!” she exclaimed. “Are you on drugs?”

“No, but that would be a way out.”

“Well, Dean, you have to learn to live whether you do it in this life or another life,” said the woman whose religion stressed reincarnation. “And so you might as well just start now.”

“Mother, it might be easier to do in another life.”

Mrs. West started to ask what was wrong, but her son quickly cut her off. “I can’t talk about it!” he said.

She told him, “Well, come this way if you’re leaving Houston. Don’t go some other place. We haven’t seen you for a long time, and if you don’t want to stay here, you can go anyplace you want to go. But just come here first.”

Mother and son talked for a few more minutes, and then Mary West said, “Well, Dean, this is running your telephone bill up.”

“I’m not counting on paying it,” her son said.

“Well, you’re gonna have to have a phone sometimes.”

“I won’t get it under these recommendations.” His mother took this to mean that he was in debt.

A few days later, when she was in Denver making deliveries, she dispatched a package containing candy, a note, and a book,
Help for Today,
by Ernest Holmes. Her note told Dean, “There’s hope for everybody,” and suggested that he and Betty Hawkins peruse the book together.

A week later, on Sunday, August 5, the same weekend when thirteen-year-old James Dreymala vanished while riding his bike in Pasadena, Mrs. West telephoned her son, but there was no answer until seven in the evening. “Where’ve you been?” Mrs. West asked lightly. “I’ve been calling all day.”

“I’ve been dodging somebody,” Corll answered. Mary West thought he must be referring to a bill collector.

“Did you get the book?”

“Yes.”

“Well, read it!” his mother ordered, and the obedient son said he would. “When are you gonna get up here?” Mrs. West asked.

“About the first of September.”

“You gonna bring Betty with you?”

“I don’t think so, this time. With the two little boys and all …”

“Are you gonna tell your dad you’re leaving Houston?”

“I’ll let ‘em know.”

It was not until her son was dead that Mrs. West learned of certain other events of his last three days. He had finished talking to her on Sunday night, then called Betty Hawkins and told her that he would not be taking her to Colorado “right away,” and then telephoned the home of Arnold Corll in another part of Houston. Dean asked his father’s wife if she thought that someone would like to take over the Pasadena house.

“I don’t think so, Dean,” the woman had answered. “But why? Are you gonna leave?” Mrs. Corll, a co-worker at Houston Lightning
& Power Company, knew that Dean had been upset lately; she had been doctoring him with stomach pills.

“I have to,” Dean answered, and refused to explain.

Mrs. Corll said, “Now, Dean, we’ve been real close. You know your daddy’s nervous. We can talk it over and work it out.”

“I can’t talk about it!” Corll repeated. “I’ll handle it.”

Later in the evening he drove to his father’s house and repaired a television set. No mention was made of the earlier conversation or his plans to leave the city.

On Monday morning, Mrs. Corll buzzed her stepson’s extension at work. “Well, Dean,” she said, “you had us worried to death. Isn’t there anything I can do?”

“No,” Corll said. “Everything’s under control.”

On the morning of Wednesday, August 8, she dialed him once again and was told that he had not shown up for work. She phoned the house in Pasadena. A man answered the telephone, and when the surprised woman identified herself, he said, “Lady, the only thing I can tell you is that you can’t talk to Dean because he’s dead.”

OF THE TWO YOUNG TRILBYS,
languishing silently in protective confinement, there was even less to say than about the dead man. The boys of The Heights, like Wayne Henley, are unlikely to accumulate heroic case histories, nor are leftover boys like David Brooks. They are born, they go to school, they drop out, they get menial jobs, they reproduce others like themselves, and they die. Those who knew both the boys said that Brooks, lean and angular at six feet two, was dominant physically and morally. A confidential memo from a police reporter noted, “Of three, Brooks probably
strongest personality…. Meaner than other two, Brooks kept .38 revolver in possession, had said that if any policeman ever walked in on parties he would shoot him.”

In his solitary cell, his belt and glasses taken against the possibility of suicide, Brooks seemed wan and forlorn, slumped on his bed, desultorily flipping the pages of a magazine while guards dropped in from other cellblocks to stare at him through the bars. When he was addressed, he jutted his head forward and lifted his sharp chin, as though hanging on every word, and smiled politely when a guard told him to “buck up.” To a suggestion that he might be inherently “bright,” Brooks mumbled something, then repeated louder, “I can’t be
too
bright, or I wouldn’t be in here,” and smiled weakly.

He had returned to his native Houston in 1970 at the age of fifteen, after bouncing from Houston to Beaumont to rural Louisiana in the choppy wake of a disintegrating family situation. A country sheriff had recommended that the boy be sent back to his father; David had stolen a potbelly stove, a heinous offense in the docile parish, and the sheriff wanted to exile the evil presence. Alton Brooks waited for the son he hardly knew at the station in Houston, and barely recognized him in long blond locks. He hauled the boy off to a barbershop, and at the end of the first cutting, he instructed the barber to start over. “I want a
boy’s
ha’rcut!” the rugged contractor demanded. The reunion was short-lived, and David went to live with his grandmother and then with the good dude, Dean Corll. As a younger child, he had been a B and C student, but at Hamilton Junior High in The Heights, where his best friend was Wayne Henley, he fell to D’s and F’s, and quit altogether at the age of fifteen. Dean Corll helped him buy a used Corvette, and the students who had looked down on him in school turned as green as the car. “It was nice!” one of them said. “I rode in it onct. He was a crazy driver! But he was kinda snotty, too, with his Vet and all.”

To most of the boys, David Brooks remained a dimly perceived figure. “He just rode up and down in his car,” one said. “He wasn’t somebody we hung around with or
wanted
to hang around with. He wasn’t all that nice. He didn’t talk that much. You’d just see him driving around the neighborhood in his Vet.”

Another teen-ager said beneath his breath, as though divulging the first word of an international scandal: “David didn’t believe in God.”

The boy who had stolen a stove in Louisiana continued to steal in Houston. He burglarized a pharmacy and shoplifted in supermarkets, and presumably played a role in the theft of the 1971 Camaro that was found stripped in the back of Dean Corll’s rented shed. His marriage, at seventeen, baffled his outspoken father. “I don’t understand thangs like that,” Alton Brooks said. “How could he be foolin’ around with a man and then get a girl pregnant? It’s the influence that Corll had over him. You can do a lot to a boy if you get control of him when he’s ten years old.”

A childhood girl friend tried to express the essence of the enigma called David Owen Brooks. “He always prided himself on not being able to have girls figure him out,” she told a radio interviewer. “If he’d say something to me, I’d say, ‘I know,’ and he’d say, ‘No, you
don’t
know. You don’t know me, you can’t figure me out.
Nobody
can figure me out.’” It was a small point of honor in his narrow life, but the only one he had.

Wayne Henley, a child of a broken home like David Brooks and so many of the murder victims, at least enjoyed the advantage of living in a single neighborhood with a fixed set of family members for most of his life. His mother Mary was as faithful, to her son as the other Mary who was busy sending letters and granting interviews in Manitou Springs, Colorado. “Wayne’s got a cold,” Mary Henley complained as she departed from a visit to the jail, “and he hasn’t even got anything to wipe his nose with. He hasn’t got
adequate clothes, he’s not fed enough, and he’s hungry, and I just want him taken care of, that’s all.” Jailers chortled, and the poor woman cried.

Along Twenty-seventh Street in The Heights, Mary Henley was known as a strict, righteous woman who worked hard for her four sons and tried to keep them out of trouble. “She was stricter with Wayne than most other parents,” Henley’s good friend Bruce Pittman said. And young Ricky Wilson added, “She was tough about us bringing anything into the house. Her and Wayne’s grandmother, Miz Weed, they’d stand at the door, pattin’ us down. ‘You got anything on you?’ She never would let anybody smoke grass in there. They musta patted me down a hundert times, and I don’t even use the stuff.”

Mrs. Henley was still too close to the memory of her ex-husband to allow her sons to dissipate in the home. Elmer Wayne Henley, Sr., had been a troublemaker and wife-beater when he was drunk and a rustic gentleman when he was sober. At the height of the family’s domestic warfare, according to neighborhood legend, the father had stationed himself on the front porch with a pistol, waiting for his wife, and pegged a shot that nearly hit his son Wayne. Now he was safely remarried, but the police blotter still recorded his name from time to time.

The oldest son, Wayne, had been a superior student before the family discord, scoring four A’s and two B’s on a typical report card in the seventh grade. His IQ ranged between 110 and 120, and his test grades were consistently in the top quarter of his class. But after the father left, Wayne accepted his role as man of the house, and simultaneously took on two part-time jobs to help support the family. His grades dropped fast, and he left school in the ninth grade. He was still admired at Hamilton by some who knew his unfortunate background. “Wayne came by to see me and asked me how his younger brothers were doing,” a beaming school official said. “He had a good haircut, and he seemed much more mature than when he was a student.”